every moment that passes has a message but we tend to distort the guide of the moment to the tune of our thinking that it becomes irrelevant..we misinterpret individuality then but we seldom realize..but the message remains the same..we need to go beyond..alas! we seldom go..

The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Monday, 1 April 2013

GLIVEC PATENT APPEAL OF NOVARTIS REJECTED: A GLOBAL REPRIEVE

It was a big concern and came as
a big relief.

It was about social concerns Vs
commercial interests and in a world where over a billion people live in
absolute poverty ($1.25 a day) while another billion plus people do not have a
comfortable living (between $1.25 to $2 a day), it was a needed reprieve.

It was a court battle in an
Indian court that the whole world was watching, from governments, to
corporations, to activists, to people, calculating the aftermath of the outcome
from their perspectives.

And the way Novartis reacted on
Supreme Court of India rejecting its Glivec (www.glivec.com)
patent appeal tells us about the scale of the stakes. Reportedly, the Swiss
pharma major has said that it would be more cautious about investing in India
in future.

But the SC decision is not about India only. It
is for the billions across the countries who cannot afford healthcare cost.

According to a report* in
2008, 54 per cent of the new cancer cases were from African and Asian countries
while the region accounted for 61 per cent of the cancer deaths. It is just a
natural corollary when such reports point out that the less developed regions
account for greater number of new cases and deaths because majority there
cannot afford the treatment available.

A report** on HIV/AIDS
prevalence says, in 2010, around 30 million of the 34 million adults and
children living with HIV/AIDS were from African, Asian and Latin American
countries. Sub-Saharan Africa alone accounted
for almost 23 million cases. Naturally, these regions have world’s poorest
countries with no or very poor health infrastructure.

The predominating stand on
healthcare in context of these concerns has to be socially oriented. Here, the
social concerns have to prevail over the commercial interests when there are
billions not able to afford the treatment costs resulting in death of millions
annually.

The SC’s Glivec decision has to
be seen in this context only.

In case of life threatening
diseases like Cancer or HIV/AIDS, the cost of the diagnosis as well as of the
medicine is out of reach of almost of the population segments living in the
poor countries.

Pharma giants claim they develop
such medicines after pumping billions of dollars in R&D. Many of such
medicines, known as blockbuster drugs (generating revenue of a billion dollar
or more a year) are priced astronomically high in order to recover the costs.

Initially justified, soon the break-even
point and the ethical business of profit-making give way to a monopolized
profiteering exploiting the legal tools like the exclusivity patent or the extended
patent once the exclusivity patent expires. In some cases, it is genuine. In
most of the cases, it is intended to manipulate, a practice known as
‘evergreening’ where the manufacturer goes for the minimum possible
modification in the drug so as to meet the patent extension criteria.

In the Glivec case, the SC didn’t
find Novartis’ claim of further changes in Glivec innovative enough to grant it
patent.

Novartis markets the drug
Imatinib under trade names Glivec and Gleevec (US). Some other trade names for
the drug are Glivic and Milatus.

Glivec is an anticancer
blockbuster drug generating billions of dollars of revenue annually. Developed
in 90s and hailed as ‘magic bullet’ in cancer treatment by the TIME magazine in
2001, Gleevec had a worldwide sale of $3.9 billion in 2009. Though it is not
sure if the figure is for overall Imatinib sale but it tells Novartis has
reaped enough of the profit from this blockbuster molecule alone.

And when it’s such an important
medicine (some say it is miraculous in effects on some forms of Leukemia), it
is to be seen and regulated that it reaches as far as possible, to the cancer
patients who cannot afford it.

The ways out are to make the
medicines available free as happened in case of Tuberculosis or to make the treatment
available at affordable cost. Now, the profiteering Big Pharma cannot be
expected to play such a role.

Tuberculosis was successfully
routed out after the multi-drug therapy was made available free of cost at a
mass level. HIV/AIDS spread has seen some significant control after the
affordable antiretroviral treatment has been made available in poorer countries
where maximum number of the affected live.

At a time, when governments and
global bodies like the UN are finding it hard to fund free shipments of the
antiretroviral medicines due to slowdown in the global economy, the generics
have come as a big reprieve saving millions of lives. Cancer has no such
provisions like the antiretroviral treatment on a worldwide scale and availability
of the generic medicines is the most important ray of hope for the cancer
patients who cannot afford the costly medicines of the big pharma companies.

So, the cost-barrier has to be
brought down, either by making free shipments available or allowing other
pharma companies to make the same medicines (generics) at fraction of prices,
so that it can reach to the maximum number of the affected people.

And why not given the sensitivity
of the price points involved. If we take the Indian examples where the country’s
apex court has rejected the patent appeal of blockbuster drugs, it becomes
clear.

Before Glivec, the SC had
rejected Bayer’s patent appeal for its anti-cancer drug Nexavar that brought
down the price, from Rs. 2,80,000 for Nexavar to Rs. 8,000 a month for its
generic version. In case of Glivec, the cost of the generic version is around
Rs. 10,000 a month while Glivec costs Rs. 1,20,000.

Given the high number of cases in
low income segments, generics are the effective way to make the treatment
available to a larger section of the global population.

The Glivec decision by the
Supreme Court of India has once again given an opportunity to reiterate it. Even
if the ruling comes as a short-lived reprieve as some analytical reports are
pointing out as it would result reduced R&D and new medicines launches in India,
it has to be appreciated for the fact that nothing is more important than
saving human lives.

An analytical article in New York
Times wrote on the development: “The ruling is a landmark in one of the most
important economic battles of the 21st century, in which rich nations that
increasingly rely on the creation of idea-based products like computer programs
and medicines require poorer countries to pay for their ideas. But some
countries – particularly India,
Brazil and China – have
begun to challenge the price they must pay, particularly when the ideas-based products
are life-saving medicines that their people desperately need now.”

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About Me

thinking, reading, n writing to fill my spaces-all this with visiting unseen places-a lot of doing n just my soul to company me-isn't it life at its best, if i can be at it-realizing every moment of life, i just need to have this in my life..

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